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http://blog.caranddriver.com/?p=82844http://blog.caranddriver.com/lemons-new-england-the-winners/#commentsMon, 07 May 2012 08:26:17 +0000Murilee MartinSome 24 Hours of LeMons races have a leader that runs away from the competition and takes the win on laps by a comfortable margin, as happened in Michigan two weeks ago. Other races, you get a weekend-long struggle between a half-dozen contending teams who spend hour after hour stuck within a few laps of one another, on an asphalt battlefield strewn with busted connecting rods and transmission chunks. This weekend’s Loudon Annoying race was the latter type, with three cars sweating the leader until the very end.-When the checkered flag came out on Sunday, the team with the most laps was the Accord-driving Bill Danger and the Road Hazzards. In a wild race with even more than the usual number of spins, offs, wrecks, and other on-track mishaps, the Bill Danger Honda didn’t catch even one black flag. The team’s pursuers all had quicker lap times (between two and four seconds better), but consistency is what wins endurance races. In the end, Bill Danger and the Road Hazzards took the overall win by three laps, with a Class B trophy as a bonus.-The Class A winner, and one of the teams that battled for the win all the way until the end, was the Booby Prize Racing Nissan 240SX.-The Keystone Kops Volvo 244 Turbo finished the race in third, missing a class win by seconds. This team would have taken the overall win if not for a couple of late-race penalties and a turbocharger failure.-The Rust In the Wind Nissan 300ZX, which features a Saab 9000 Turbo engine under its weirdly-shaped hood, went on a nothing-to-lose passing binge in the last hour of the race and had just clawed its way to P2 when the driver pushed a little too hard and spun out. You can’t make even one mistake in a race like this.-The Class C trophy went home with the Punisher GP Peugeot 405 Mi16 team, which beat its closest rival (a third-gen Firebird) by 13 laps.-Enough with these lap-count-based awards! The top prize of the race, the Index of Effluency, was glommed in decisive, no-other-choice fashion by the Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws entry: a Viking pop-up camping trailer built around a Suzuki X90.-Speedycop’s trailer ran all day Saturday and managed to pass a few of the other cars, but cracked the cylinder head at the end of the day’s session. The team thrashed all night and most of Sunday morning to fix the head (with J-B Weld and optimism), and the repair seemed to work… but not for long.-When The Trailer limped off the track midday Sunday, the team figured it had a few more laps in the just-about-zero-compression engine. With several minutes remaining before the end, they sent The Trailer out on the track, in order to bask in the glory of the checkered-flag lap. This tactic proved successful, but The Trailer couldn’t quite drive the final stretch under its own power. Here we see it and an expired Volvo getting some help to the track exit.-The Most Heroic Fix trophy went to Team Back To The Future In a VW. These guys refused to give up on their breakdown-plagued Scirocco, swapping multiple engines and transmissions and at one point sending a team member’s teenaged sister on a midnight parts run hundreds of miles away.-For the I Got Screwed award, the Got Wood? Porsche 944 was the obvious choice. It’s hard to get more hellish than a broken LeMons 944 (perhaps the 928 is slightly worse), but this team put in the 16 hours necessary to do a 944 engine swap after Engine #1 blew a rod through the oil pan… and then Engine #2 also threw a rod, about 50 feet after the car entered the track.-Team Mean Girls and their Civic earned the Organizer’s Choice trophy for their disturbing “Mustache Ride” theme and entertaining rookie-driver antics.-]]>http://blog.caranddriver.com/lemons-new-england-the-winners/feed/1